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DEWA
Project
Role: Lead UX Designer, Smart Platforms
Organization: Dubai Electricity & Water Authority (DEWA)
Sector: Government / Public Services
Scope: Smart digital platforms, data dashboards, EV charging experience, and voice-based government services
Context
DEWA serves millions of residents and businesses across Dubai with mission-critical services spanning electricity, water, billing, sustainability initiatives, and infrastructure. As Lead UX Designer within Smart Platforms, I designed scalable, accessible government experiences across multiple digital initiatives, covering web and mobile touchpoints, operational dashboards, and voice interfaces, including one of the region’s earliest government-grade Amazon Alexa integrations.
I managed and delivered work across three government projects with combined budgets exceeding $2M, aligning UX outcomes with stakeholder expectations, platform constraints, and public-sector reliability requirements.
The challenge
Government UX is “design for everyone,” not a narrow segment.
DEWA’s digital services had to:
• Support a highly diverse population with wide variance in digital literacy
• Work across languages, including Arabic-first and RTL contexts
• Meet accessibility and inclusivity expectations as a baseline
• Remain coherent across multiple services while scaling safely
• Introduce new interaction models (voice) without excluding users
The risk wasn’t building advanced digital services. The risk was building services that felt impressive on paper but were unclear, inaccessible, or untrustworthy in real-life use, especially when users depend on them.
What we learned that shaped the work
A recurring theme across essential services: many users didn’t struggle with “doing the task.” They struggled with understanding what’s possible and trusting that digital services would work reliably end-to-end.
This made clarity, predictable behavior, and transparent system feedback non-negotiable, especially for journeys tied to payments, infrastructure, and daily utilities.
Approach (inclusive, scalable, future-ready)
The work followed a pragmatic, delivery-grade model built for public services:
• Accessibility as a baseline influencing hierarchy, focus order, touch targets, contrast, and system feedback, not a late checklist.
• Arabic-first and RTL built in from day one, including layout logic, content structure, and component behavior.
• Service design discipline: aligning front stage UX with backend realities and government platform constraints.
• Voice as an extension of service logic, not a parallel “demo layer,” ensuring fallback paths and predictable outcomes.
Design and validation were conducted in close collaboration with stakeholders, engineering teams, and platform owners to ensure feasibility, compliance, and long-term scalability.
Flagship outcomes (high-impact initiatives)
1. Dubai’s EV Charging Network (Green Charger): Experience Design at Infrastructure Scale
I led the design and testing of Dubai’s EV Charging Network experience when it had ~400 chargers, contributing to what became the region’s first public EV charging infrastructure experience layer. The focus was clarity in real-world contexts: location discovery, status visibility, task completion confidence, and reliable feedback loops that work under time pressure.
2. DEWA Smart Living: Government Voice UX (Amazon Alexa)
I launched DEWA’s first-in-market Amazon Alexa skill for Smart Living, implementing Right-to-Left APL and Arabic Natural Language Processing (NLP) for the first time in the region. The conversational model prioritized safe, predictable task completion: clear confirmations, explicit system status, and controlled recovery paths for misunderstood intents, built to earn trust in a public-service context.
3. Operational Dashboards: Clarity for Internal Decision-Making
I designed and implemented five internal and external dashboards, improving data accessibility and operational efficiency across departments by clarifying information hierarchy, interaction patterns, and “at-a-glance” decision cues for different stakeholder roles.
Design execution and fidelity
Fidelity was used strategically, high-fidelity screens were produced for the critical journeys to validate hierarchy, accessibility behavior, and RTL execution, while system logic and voice intent models were specified at the interaction level (states, confirmations, fallbacks, and escalation rules).
This ensured reliability and inclusivity without slowing delivery under government constraints.
Deliverables
• End-to-end service journey maps across channels
• Wireframes and high-fidelity UI for critical government services (with accessibility and RTL rules embedded)
• Voice interaction model: intents, confirmations, receipts, and recovery paths
• Accessibility and usability recommendations packaged for stakeholder and platform alignment
• Dashboard UX specifications (hierarchy, interactions, and role-based clarity)
Impact
• Delivered inclusive, scalable public-service UX across three major initiatives (> $2M budgets).
• Helped enable Dubai’s EV charging service UX at ~400 chargers, supporting public adoption through clarity and reliability.
• Shipped a first-in-region government voice experience with RTL APL + Arabic NLP, expanding access through a future-ready interaction model.
• Improved internal operational visibility through five dashboards that made data more usable for day-to-day decision-making.
Reflection
In public services, innovation without inclusion is failure. Voice and “smart” interfaces only work when the core service journeys are predictable, accessible, and trustworthy for the full population. This work reinforced that the most powerful government UX is the kind that disappears, because it works, for everyone, every time.
NDA note
Visuals and details are simplified or reconstructed to preserve confidentiality while reflecting real platforms, service logic, and outcomes.
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